New York, January 20, 2012– BuzzFeed, the first true social news organization, has hired respected writer and editor Doree Shafrir to aggressively expand and shape its culture coverage.
Ms. Shafrir will join an editorial team led by Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith and Managing Editor Scott Lamb, under Jonah Peretti, Founder and CEO of BuzzFeed.
"I'm excited to join the editorial talent that is converging at BuzzFeed,” said Ms. Shafrir. “The site has very quickly become THE place for a new breed of political writer and reporter to work at and I am excited to work with Ben and Scott to continue this momentum in new culture-based verticals.”
“We’ve turned our political coverage into a must-read over the last month and Doree is going help us do the same thing for our coverage of pop culture,” said Mr. Smith. “She’ll be working with great BuzzFeed editors like Matt Cherette, Whitney Jefferson, and Gavon Laessig. She’ll be taking BuzzFeed to the next level by recruiting talented new voices to new categories of coverage.”
“I am an avid reader of Doree’s work and beyond thrilled she is joining the team as Executive Editor,” said Mr. Peretti. “She was ahead of her time writing stories with the emotional intelligence and social impact that has now become the currency of the social web.”
Shafrir is currently senior editor at Rollingstone.com. She has been a writer and editor at the New York Observer and Gawker and has written for the New York Times, Jezebel, Slate, the New Yorker, the Awl and New York Magazine, where she wrote a 2010 cover story on the burgeoning New York tech scene http://nymag.com/news/media/65494/.
Shafrir, who lives in Brooklyn, will start at BuzzFeed in February. For more information on BuzzFeed, visit http://www.buzzfeed.com
Media Contact:
Alice Suh
BuzzFeed
alice@buzzfeed.com
646.599.8652
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About BuzzFeed
BuzzFeed publishes the hottest, most social content on the web to an audience of over 25 million monthly visitors. The company is led by Jonah Peretti, an MIT Media Lab graduate and Huffington Post co-Founder.